Melting the ice curtain

Press, 24 October 1989, Page 13

Melting the ice curtain

WILLIAM MILLINSHIP

reports on how an agreement signed in

Jackson Hole, Wyoming, allows the Eskimos of Siberia and Alaska to meet for family reunions.

THE ICE CURTAIN separating the Eskimos of Siberia from their relatives in Alaska has melted in the new warmth of United States-Soviet relations.

One of the agreements signed in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, between the U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker, and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, allows Eskimos to travel without visas across the frontier in the Bering Strait area. A written, invitation from the other side will serve in lieu of a visa, and an official of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow suggested that American Eskimos would be heading west by kayak or snowmobile, according to season. The agreement will not affect huge numbers of people, but for them it is of immense import--5 r<

ance. Relatives separated for decades will now be able to meet and catch up on their family histories. There are some 100,000 Eskimos — they prefer to be known as Inuit — living in Canada, Greenland, the Soviet Union and the United States. The agreement will affect the 1200 Inuit of Alaska and the 1200 who live in the Chukotka Peninsula on the other side of the strait.

They speak the same language, Yupik, and many of them are related, because Siberian Inuit crossed into Alaska in the 1920 s in search of better hunting.

Family reunions were common, until World War II brought the closure of the border and its stricter policing. The first sign of a real thaw came this northern summer, when Soviet Eskimos were allowed for the first time to attend a meeting of the international Eskimo organisation, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, held in Greenland. The I.C.C. had lobbied for years on behalf of the divided families of the Bering Strait, but the Soviet authorities refused to issue visas for what was a tightly closed area. President Gorbachev’s policy

of openness and his new thinking in foreign policy are. largely responsible for the change of heart in the Kremlin. But this has also been helped along by the recent growth of the ecological movement in the Soviet Union, and the new understanding of what the ruthless exploitation of Siberia has meant for the tiny and vulnerable peoples of the Soviet North.

journals have discovered — and reported — with horror that life expectancy for native northerners is no more than 45 for men and 55 for women, and in some places is even lower.

The damage to the environment has not only wrecked traditional ways of life, but in many areas has also undermined the health of the indigenous populations. Soviet newspapers and

The suicide rate is three or four times higher than that for the Soviet Union as a whole. These discoveries have been given added resonance by the election of the new, outspoken and democratic People’s Congress, and the new sensitivity to the whole question of the rights of ethnic minorities in the multinational Soviet Federation. All these factors came together in 1989 in such a way that this northern winter Alaskan Eskimos will be able to rev their Snowmobiles past the K.G.B. border post on their way to meet their relatives on the other side. Copyright London Observer